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Ask-a-Grower Podcast #7-House & Garden Nutrients Top Booster

Transcription

Introducing Top Booster:

We are here continuing our talks about House & Garden products, and we have moved on to Top Booster. Top Booster is the flowering stimulator, it basically triggers the plant into thinking that the end of its life cycle has begun. Top Booster contains high levels phosphorous and potassium, as well as some chelated red iron. What the iron does, is in the very end stages of the plant’s life cycle, you really start dropping the nitrogen out a lot. You don’t want there to be a lot of nitrogen in the leaves, it’s going to effect the flavor and the taste of the plant. So the iron helps restore some vitality the nitrogen would typically maintain. It helps green it up a little bit, kind of restore some of the vitality without the added nitrogen. You use Top Booster 3 weeks before the end harvest, for 3 to 4 days. Or if you’re on a one week reservoir cycle, you would add it in the middle, or the 4th day of the 7 day reservoir cycle.

Basically roughly around 4 weeks before you believe you are going to harvest your garden, you need to apply the Top Booster. And this is going to go ahead and set the plant into a major fall cycle. It’s basically going to tell it to start shutting it’s leaves down, and sending everything purely to the flower. All of your expensive nutrients that you worked so hard to get are going to go all to the flower now, and sweeten just purely that. Also, the Top Booster, that red iron..keeping that vitality in the plant, is a really neat thing. When it comes to rinse time, the plant actually rinses a lot easier, actually being able to have a little vitality in it instead of just being shut down and just stuck with what’s in it.

Q: What happens if I use Top Booster too early?

Again, this Top Booster is the main trigger for fall. So basically by adding Top Booster too soon, within a couple weeks, you’re gonna see your leaves turn yellow. Basically at about 4 weeks your plants are probably going to shut down early. There are rare occasions where the plant actually does survive through Top Booster, but basically its going to shut your garden down.

When we say shut your garden down, we mean, you’re utilizing this product to trigger the late aggressive flowering. You’re intending on having harvested your determinant crop, you know 3 weeks, 4 weeks after you use Top Booster. So it’s going to start, as he was saying, yellowing the leaves, and just get everything ready for harvest time.

So since flowering or fruiting stage is part of a reproductive cycle, the Top Booster triggers it’s life is coming to an end, so it makes it finish faster or start to finish at that point. Actually even in some systems they don’t have the natural fall triggers that are in place sometimes. As ground dehydrates in certain areas, different minerals are available. Sometimes people cannot achieve this in hydro. It’s a system that constantly requires watering to the plant’s root system or it dies. Top Booster is another great way to add this finishing flowering trigger to the plants to ensure that they are going to ripen to its fullest potential.

Also triggering the late stage of aggressive flowering just allows the plant to concentrate all of its energy on fruit production, like we were mentioning the reproductive cycle. The plant wants to ensure that its gonna be around for next season, and the way that it’s doing that is through fruit production. So at the very end of it’s life cycle, it’s just concentrating all of it’s energy on that. There is no energy on leaf production, no energy on growth, only on fruit production.

Q: What about using Magnesium with this product?

From our scientists from Holland, they have developed the product for many years now, through family generations. They have definitely suggested not to add excess magnesium to House & Garden. House & Garden is one of the products more plentiful in calcium magnesium, which many other products may have issues with. So no, I would never suggest adding magnesium to House & Garden products.